To study the fundamental characteristics of electromagnetic wave scattering of densely distributed random media, we conducted extensive experiments using millimeter-wave bistatic radar and dielectric cylinders of different sizes and concentrations. Experiments were run with fractional volume densities of 10% and 30% along with the highly dense case. It is shown that for ka≈6, the dense and highly dense scattering resembles the single scattering characteristics of the cylinder. For ka≈3 the dense case resembles the single scattering case, but the highly dense case exhibits much different behavior. The experimental results were compared with second-order radiative transfer theory. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995